The upgrade system is so convaluted!

Community General Discussion
1

I mean this is just ONE part of what you need! This is truly insane!!

Flightstones are an item used in Dragonflight Season 2 to upgrade PvE gear (along with Shadowflame Crests). Flightstones are required for all PvE item upgrades, from Explorer 1/8 (i376) to Hero 5/5 (i441). Generally speaking, the higher the item level you are upgrading, the more flightstones you will need to use, however the actual cost also depends on the item being upgraded, with weapons requiring the most. Flightstones have no weekly or seasonal cap, but you can only hold up to 2,000 per character at any one time, and they can not be traded between characters. Flightstones come from almost all Season 2 PvE content, including Treasures, Quests, World Quests, Rares, Rare Elites, Weekly Bosses, Fyrakk Assaults, Dungeons, Mythic+ and Raids, with harder content rewarding more flightstones.

Item upgrades in Season 2 have an Account-Wide discount - for a given item slot, if you upgrade a new item at a lower item level than you’ve previously upgraded for that slot, you will only need to pay 50% of the cost of the upgrade. For example, if you already have a belt - [Drogbar Girdle of Great Lifting] which dropped at Veteran 2/8 (i405), and you upgraded it to Veteran 7/8 (i421) before [Drogbar Belt of the Wonderous Winner’s Enclave] dropped at Champion 1/8 (i415), you can upgrade the new belt up to Champion 3/8 (i421) for 50% of the Flightstone cost that it would’ve taken if you didn’t upgrade the initial item, as well as not costing Shadowflame Crests. If the item dropped for a different character on your account, the Flightstone discount would still apply, however you would need to use Shadowflame Crests if the upgrade required it. For slots with two items (Rings, Trinkets and Weapons), the lower level of the two items is the one that counts for the purposes of upgrade discounts.

Finally, Flightstones are also used for upgrading crafted gear. You can buy an Empowered Flightstone from Dustmonger Topuiz for 150 Flightstones, which can be combined with an Enchanted Shadowflame Crest to upgrade a crafted item to between i395 and i447, depending on the rank of Shadowflame Crest.

What an abomination!

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Blizz is obsessed with grinding currency farms. Its why people get bored and leave.

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Get Flightstones from doing any content.

Get Crests from Doing Any Content, the quality of crest is based on difficulty.

Upgrading gear takes both.
Want to upgrade a Heroic Piece of Gear? You’ll need crests from Heroic Raid or +10 or higher dungeons.

Suuuuuper complicated.

17 Likes
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You’re not actually supposed to use the upgrade system. It’s just an excuse to keep from firing the systems team.

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I read your post in its entirety, sounds like the opposite of convoluted to me.

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I’m sensing sarcasm.

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:face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Flightstones are a nothing-burger. They exist to give you something when you complete dungeon and raid content that technically exists but doesn’t really do anything. You do a quest and get flightstones and you go “yay I got something” and it’s nothing.

Crests are just an amalgamation of two things we already had, Valor and Conc Primals. They’re a simplification of an existing system, bringing these two currencies together instead of having valor and crafting on their own tracks.

Seems very simple and straightforward to me.

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Not in the least tbh!

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Currency farming is lame… Wouldn’t be so bad if it was accountwide.

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Id rather them just make the gear drop from mobs and monsters and rares. CUrrency grinds is boring and makes me wanna log off

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The Flightstone’s are from what little i understand, but that is even made worse from my OP, it takes a freaking degree in rocket science to figure this out. I mean the tool tip for Whelpling’s Shadowflame crest says that it is only used to upgrade Higher level adventures gear, and lower level Veteran gear. Ok so wth if higher lvl adventurer gear, and wth is Veteran gear? You look on Wowhead, and it says the Whelpling’s Shadowflame Crest is used in enchanting, that then in turn says you can upgrade this or that in the tool tip!

Like WTF, seriously?

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I am so confusion.

Can explorer be upgraded to veteran or is it capped? So veteran will need to be obtained in other ways? I don’t get this at all :woozy_face:

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The system has too many parts. The only thing that’s remotely passable is that Flightstones are basically a replacement for Elemental Overflow. Except they could have created an obvious connection between the two; call the new one Concentrated Elemental Overflow and create a trade ratio of 5000:1 or something.

The crests are almost entirely unnecessary in their current form. Those could have been used as transition items between tiers instead of…whatever it is they do now. It would have also been nice to see some retroactive implementation as I figured that since world quest and rare drops were within the new upgrade system, I’d be able to start upgrading the Integrated Primal Fire I have on my warrior. Unlike most active trinkets in this game, I actually like that one and would like to keep it.

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Me neither! All i know is i have 200 flightstones from cruising the plain’s, thats about it. Have 2 Whelpling things, but the tool tip is vague af.

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16

Badges would’ve been simpler.

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The sheer amount of different items that act as some kind of currency or material is really putting me off personnaly.

This expac is doing a lot of things right but if I had 1 criticism, it would be the amount of “junk” we amass as “semi-useful/required” items.

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Ok and that would make you an idiot.

Can we agree?

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It’s capped.

For anyone that doesn’t get it here is the TLDR:

Flightstones drop in all content and are the universal material for upgrades

Crests are also used for upgrades, different crest pieces drop from different levels of content and can be combined into a crest which are used to upgrade different upgrade tracks.

Items have an upgrade track, you cannot change the track. You will need to refarm gear if you want to go to a higher track.

Crests can be used by enchanters to create a crest that can be used for crafting.

It’s a terrible system and will harm the game. The mere fact that you need to refarm gear in an “upgrade” system makes it a completely worthless system. Anyone that like farming M+2 for gear are now forced to farm +17. The only group this system really helps are raiders, for low end M+ players it’s a massive downgrade, for high end M+ players they won’t even notice a difference.

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You get it!

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I’m totally confused by the new system. Seems like it doesn’t go beyond 400ilvl for me anyway so I’m just gonna ignore it.

1 Like